The Armorer sniffed and fumbled for his spectacles, taking them out of an inside pocket and trying to wipe them clean with a kerchief.
“Not the best of nights, compadre,” he said to Ryan, stretching his arms so that the muscles creaked.
“Thought I heard the sound of an explosion, somewhere around two o’clock. Listened for it, but there was no more sound. And there was a noisy pack of coyotes hunting over to the east, coupla hours later.”
J.B. nodded. “Heard the animals. Didn’t hear any explosion. Must’ve been during one of the bits of sleep I managed. Few and far between.”
“Don’t fancy our chances of finding much food in this place,” Ryan said.
“There’s that settlement on the map, on our line of march toward the fortress.” He pulled his fedora from his coat and uncrumpled it, jamming it on his head.
Ryan was unbuckling his belt and readying himself for the scramble down to the soaking ground below. “Try for it. Should get there around the middle of the day.”
“REMEMBER TO RELOAD the blaster?” J.B. asked as they started off north and westward.
“Yeah. Before we settled for the night.”
They had made good progress. A few minutes after leaving their nighttime refuge, they struck a narrow hunting trail that snaked through the woods, eventually leading to a deserted and overgrown blacktop that ran roughly north and south.
It was marked on their map and appeared to take them directly toward the small ville.
There was no sign at all of the road being used recently, and no trace of any kind of human habitation.
The friends walked alongside each other, talking little, constantly on the alert for any threat.
Ryan brought up the subject of what they’d do if they were unable to rescue the others.
“Have to go along with what they want.”
J.B. sniffed. “No choice. Trader used to tell us that when you had no choice, it made things a shit-lot easier. No worrying about making a decision.”
“Means getting at the stickies to start the plantation and mine going again.”
“Wonder what happened to those three foremen that vanished. Wolfram reckoned the stickies got them.”
Ryan stepped around a patch of leprous fungus with pale green spots on a sickly yellow top. He’d come across them elsewhere in Deathlands, knowing that to crush them with your boots released a cloud of almost invisible noxious spores that affected sight and breathing. They nestled in the center of a delicate ring of the ubiquitous, fragile yellow-and-white flowers known as Deathlands daisies.
“Could have done a runner?”
J.B. nodded. “Mebbe. What if the stickies have completely abandoned the area? Means that there’s no hope of getting the slave labor to work the mine and the land. What do we do then, old friend?”
Ryan grinned mirthlessly. “Then we go in and do us some heavy chilling.”
THEY PASSED a lopsided billboard a little before noon. The board was pocked with bullet holes, leaning down to the left, so badly weathered that it was almost illegible.
Ryan stopped and wiped off a coating of gray green lichen, reading it slowly.
“Three Miles Ahead. Paul Burgess Art Village. Admission Rates Published At Entrance. World-Famous Displays Of This Top Artist’s Work.”
“That must be the ville marked on our map,” J.B. said, slapping at an insect that was buzzing around his face. “Didn’t say it was some kind of art show.”
“Wonder if it’s occupied?”
“Soon find out.”
But before they’d covered the three miles, they came across the first sight of the work of the stickies.
RYAN HAD BEEN TELLING his partner about a bizarre dream that had disturbed his sleep.
“Sullen, lead-colored sea, with small breakers. I was watching from the top of a cliff, looking out to where Krysty was doing some swimming. Saw her red hair, like a fire in the water, about a quarter mile off. Everything seemed calm and in the ordinary, then I saw the sharks.”
“Big whites?”
Ryan shook his head. “No. More like basking sharks. But mutie large. Forty or fifty feet long. I saw the flukes first, then they rolled together, showing their tails and dorsals. They were close to the beach below me, between Krysty and safety. She was swimming in, stopping to wave to me. From where she was, the sharks weren’t visible.”